There’s a new sweet spot in Bethlehem — and folks are lining up to grab a taste.

“The reception from people in the Lehigh Valley has been a resounding one. They seriously love our product,” Lan Ma, owner of the first Paris Baguette in the Lehigh Valley, said.

“We have a hotcake on our hands.”

The bakery café opened April 28 and celebrated its grand opening May 9 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony with local community leaders as well as a representative of the building’s landlord, Dream Boyd Project.

It serves up delectable goodies from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., 365 days a year.

Ma worked at IBM for nearly 25 years before deciding to take the leap to open the area’s first Paris Baguette franchise. As part of this journey, Ma became a published author, sharing her inspiring story and experience of becoming a Paris Baguette owner in “Living Longevity: How to Reset Time.”

Ma has a full-time job as a project manager and creates multiple businesses. This entrepreneur is bursting with enthusiasm for her new endeavor, and shared her thoughts on the venture on a recent rainy May evening at the bakery café.

Ma said her involvement with Lehigh Valley Women of Adventure (LVWoA) — a local nonprofit women’s outdoor adventure group promoting numerous outdoor activities — sparked her interest in blazing this new trail in Bethlehem’s historic downtown. After joining the group in January 2023, “I became more physically active and saw the value of community — members supporting each other in hosted events,” Ma said.

Ma said she saw the value of human interaction, which she had not seen too much after 21 years of working from home. “Through LVWoA, I saw the beauty of looking in someone’s eyes — I know the value of human connection.”

Then Ma had lunch with a realtor friend who commented that there aren’t any Asian-owned stories in the Lehigh Valley. Ma’s mind whirled into action with an idea. “I thought of Paris Baguette — our happy place when my kids were growing up in Edison, N.J.” It was a place, Ma said, where “the cakes brought oohs and ahhs.”

Ma looked into the Paris Baguette franchise, which subsequently presented her with eight sites from which to choose for her franchise location. It only took her three-and-a-half hours to select Broad Street.

Ma recalled when her family moved from New Jersey to Nazareth and then Easton, it just didn’t feel like home. But when they moved to Hellertown, her daughter spent four years attending Lehigh Valley Charter School of the Arts in Bethlehem, and she fell in love with The Christmas City.

“Bethlehem to me is a larger than life entity,” Ma said, rattling off the city’s high points, such as its history, including the historic Hotel Bethlehem and the Moravian Church settlement being recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2024.

“I am so attracted to this place,” Ma said, noting she had opened the first vape shop in the Lehigh Valley — then known as electronic cigarettes — in 2013 at 559 Main St., which has since closed.

“It somehow seems God is keeping me here in Bethlehem. There are so many things I’m connected to. It felt more special here.”

Ma said in its first week, her Paris Baguette franchise more than doubled the highest projection given to her by corporate Paris Baguette. “We were overwhelmed — we didn’t anticipate the volume we were experiencing.”

On the fourth day of that first week, their sales ranked number two out of the more than 4,000 Paris Baguette locations worldwide.

The front house — cashiers and baristas — were like “deer in the headlights,” Ma said. “We didn’t have enough people. We planned for a third of the volume we experienced.”

Since then, she is consistently hiring and training staff.

“It taught me we have a wonderful product on our hands the Lehigh Valley can’t get enough of,” Ma said, adding a multitude of people waited in line for over an hour to get their cakes and other pastries.

The Saturday before Mother’s Day was the location’s biggest day, but they handled it. Ma said Mother’s Day itself was “hugely busy,” but she wouldn’t force people to work on Mother’s Day, so they plowed through the day with the staff on hand.

Paris Baguette offers a selection of 18 different cakes, with the most popular so far being the Strawberry Soft Cream Cake, made with fresh strawberries. All products have no preservatives, and 95 percent are prepared, baked and decorated on site. Cake slices, doughnuts, pastries and cream bread are also on the menu.

The bakery café offers salads and sandwiches with bread baked on site. Sweet and savory options include four cheese quiche, pepperoni and buffalo chicken pizzetta (petite pizza), curry and crabmeat croquettes and rice flour doughnuts that are gluten friendly. Add to that multiple types of sweet options with pastries topped with real fruit, as well as Lavazza Italian coffee.

Ma said it usually takes a first time Paris Baguette franchise owner at least 18 months to open in a brand-new space that you build out — it took Ma 13 months. “Corporate would like me to open another one in the Lehigh Valley because of how I didn’t miss a beat.”

“It was perfect. We opened with no delays, and the speed with which it happened was unbelievable,” Ma said.

A project manager by profession, Ma doesn’t work at Paris Baguette, but hires the staff. However, she was on site one day when customers came in from Macungie wanting to meet her, specifically to ask her to open a franchise in their area.

So, will she or won’t she open a second location? For now, Ma is “managing the madness” at the Bethlehem site, but will make a decision soon.

“Mine is not your typical story of someone opening a franchise. Many try to open and sell to make a profit and market their business model. That’s not why I opened,” Ma said.

“This is my pay-it-forward project. I want it to become the living room of Bethlehem.”

Ma wants Paris Baguette to be a community for employees. She wants to create jobs and create a place where aspirations become reality, where people can come to work and when they leave can afford to be the people and parents they want to be.

Ma wants to run the bakery café so that it is voted one of the best work places in the Lehigh Valley.

“I care about the employees and their dreams.”

In many ways, Ma’s endeavor with Paris Baguette is a love letter to Bethlehem — and she continues writing the pages.